But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
The relevance of this is way overstated. Most people haven't formed opinions on most topics and just want to hear different viewpoints so they can form an opinion.
> It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap. Might as well ask why subreddits are popular.
i suspect this is exactly what the comment you're replying to means.
i too have a problem with how many times i read people crying out "echo chamber" repeatedly as if this is always a bad thing.
i mean, when i have a party, i don't invite assholes.
when we go to bars, we don't invite spazzy people.
i don't invite people who think its oppressive if they're asked to have common courtesy.
i dont invite abusive people who have the social skills of a tantrum throwing 3 year old.
they just ruin the time for everyone. by many of these people's definitions, this is an echo-chamber.
we exist in the real world. i can have parties with friends and discussions with friends, this doesn't mean im somehow _never_ exposed to different ideas--no one ever shuts up about their ideas. not wanting to be around people we find weird is absolutely normal.
at the end of the day, if a website or party or bar is full of shitty behaving people, ill just go to a different space where people behave with basic social skills. thats not weird. thats not an echo chamber.
every bar or club in the world has different expectations of behaviors, its not evil of them, its not nefarious, its not scandalous of them. its just the culture the owners are curating. that isn't some scary echo-chamber. its a completely normal thing that happens _all_over_the_place_ in the real world.
but oddly theres a weird segment of people who are trying to convince me if someone is just constantly rude or spazzy, and im like "yo, this dudes kinda weird" that everyone should always have to be around them. thats just strange and not the norm in the physical real world. its really odd from the foundations.
edit to add: a perfect example of curation is this site that we all spend a decent amount of time on. dang curates the discussion. its not an echo chamber by any rational definition of the term. the site owners and mods have curated the patrons, the environment, the overall tone of the site--and from an end-users perspective, it works very well. its fun. its an enjoyable experience.
as i mentioned above, people who think it’s oppressive when they’re asked to have common courtesy. for example many people have been banned because they can’t stop insulting people of different races—they’re being banned for behaviors, they refuse to have common courtesy. they cry loudly when asked not to be abusive. that’s a behavior. and most of the time these weirdos are banned, it’s because they’re too socially inept to understand basic social skills.
Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check.
Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...
What this comes down to is the level of good faith at play: hearing dissenting ideas is good if you’re in a place to take them seriously and the dissenter is being genuine and willing to discuss them in good faith. If those aren’t true, it’s not a win: nobody benefits from giving a liar or propagandist a podium and someone who can’t agree on some kind of objective baseline won’t be able or willing to adjust their beliefs.
You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?
I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.
Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.
Extremists don’t care about disagreement – they’re there to talk, not listen – and if they see a few fellow travelers they’ll start to tell themselves their position is mainstream.
Yes, those elections were violent and also final step to power was under threat of violence. At this point, nazi were already clearly violent. Their first steps after getting power were creation of concentration camps for opposition.
This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.
And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.
For example, I'm in my late forties. When I was growing up, it was rare to encounter (out) gay people outside of major cities, and people would believe practically any negative statement about them, not so much anymore. Conversely, in my college town today, most of my accquaintences have never met a Republican, and they predictably believe in a stupid cartoon caricature of red staters. I'm definitely not buying it.